Memoir has for some time played a significant role in the expansion and
interpretation of the humanitarian industry. For both the relief and
development industries memoir is admirably suited as an ambassador from the
field to the larger public, oriented as it is to personal experience and
testimony. This chapter explores how humanitarian memoir generates an aura
of authenticity much-needed by an industry reliant on public donations and
on the perception of its status as a player outside the systems of state
sovereignty and global capital. Analysing two founder narratives, this
chapter considers the ‘humanitarian naive’ at work: the role of the ‘fool’
proves both revelatory and empowering, asserting the value of sui generis
intelligence to produce humanitarian knowledge and even participate in
global governance.

Memoir has for some time played a
significant role in the expansion and interpretation of the humanitarian
industry. It was Henri Dunant’s 1862 memoir A Memory of Solferino
that made the case for the first global institutionalisation of
humanitarian work in the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross)
and Geneva Convention, and Moritz Thomsen’s 1969 memoir Living Poor:
A Peace Corps Chronicle that helped promote participation in the US
Peace Corps.1 As the
industry has become entrenched as a third player permanently integrated
into global relations, humanitarian memoir has become a fast-growing
genre. For both the relief and development industries memoir is
admirably suited as an ambassador from the field to the larger public,
oriented as it is to personal experience and testimony. The genre helps
build awareness of humanitarian efforts and issues and facilitates the
translation of professional work to popular understanding; most
important, as a medium whose defining posture is confessional and
revelatory, humanitarian memoir generates an aura of authenticity
much-needed by an industry reliant on public donations and on the
perception of its status as a player outside the systems of state
sovereignty and global capital.

Unlike other forms of humanitarian narrative, which are
focused on humanitarian crises and projects or on the work of a
particular organisation, humanitarian life-writing tells a story of
individual education and empowerment. As a result the genre’s emphasis
is not the typical one of compassion and pathos, though images of human
suffering may be highlighted. Instead, humanity is defined
intellectually as a pure intelligence and understanding that operates
outside of established systems of knowledge production, separated from
corporate and bureaucratic hegemony. In humanitarian memoir the
prototypical humanitarian is the naive who confronts injustice with
instinct; naivety and even foolishness are presented as the hallmark of
the humanitarian agent and the ultimate sources of his or her power. The
memoir-based humanitarian speaks to a broad public alienation from a
rising culture of expertise and from ‘big’ management more generally.
Since the end of the Cold War, as aid has
increasingly been channelled through mega NGOs who take on the roles of
state actors, appetite for stories about the naive exceptionality of the
humanitarian industry has begun to find its voice. Paradoxically, this
figure has come most to life just as humanitarianism has become more
professionalised, assuring readers that the face of this global
multi-billion dollar industry is still predicated on the spontaneous
ingenuousness and ingenuity of the rogue actor bucking the system in
order to effect social change.2

As the aid world has expanded to serve its beneficiaries in
mass capacity, confronting greater exigencies of service delivery,
accountability and public relations, its discourse and biographies have
become increasingly planned, standardised and scientific. Originally
consisting of a few small emergency-driven charity groups in the first
half of the twentieth century, the humanitarian industry has since the
Second World War become ‘increasingly centralized and bureaucratized’, a
necessary result of the secularisation of an industry increasingly
shaped by states and internationalist development economists.3 The hallmark of this
approach is ‘planning-mindedness’, an orientation that sees humanitarian
work less as a simple response to immediate need than as a complex
operation casting the long view across an unevenly developed world,
looking towards progress and modernisation.4 During the decades following the end of
the Second World War, the turn to planning and rationalisation created
important overlap between relief and development, especially as
operations globalised. It was this era that saw the rise of the
humanitarian ‘kit’, a prepackaged assembly of tools designed to help
expand a particular development project or type of emergency action by
standardising it.5
During the 1990s, when the humanitarian industry expanded again with the
collapse of the Cold War and retreat of the welfare state, humanitarian
organisations began to grapple with issues of accountability, mostly to
donors who expected not just financial transparency but impact
assessment. Organisations ‘introduced camp surveys; developed
performance indicators; and created new methodologies and instruments
that can better assess effectiveness’.6 Amongst these instruments was the
logical framework approach (LFA), a planning and evaluating tool adapted
by USAID and eventually the aid world from the US military and NASA.7 A staple of results
based management based on the application of ‘basic scientific methods’,
log frames have been controversial due to their technocratic,
mechanistic approach.8 The widespread use of the LFA also reflects the growth
of professional development training in the past couple of decades,
especially of degree programmes oriented towards a career in
international relief or development.9 A recent article in Forbes magazine has
described a master’s degree in an appropriate (usually social
sciences-based) field as a ‘must’ for the aspiring international aid
worker, a reality confirmed by job postings and surveys amongst
professionals in the field.10

Professionally, then, the face that humanitarianism is
increasingly putting forward is one that mixes managerial culture,
scientisation and institutional training. This rationalisation of the
humanitarian endeavor reinforces and extends to aid
worker subjectivity the phenomenon that Didier Fassin has called
‘humanitarian reason’ – the administrative judgement and discourse by
which the humanitarian conglomerate governs those who come under its
wing.11 As we shall
see, humanitarian memoir provides a counter-discourse to this
phenomenon. For the aid industry’s appeal to the public generally relies
on the allure of individuals living outside the system, thinking outside
the system, and experiencing the world non-systematically. Even as
humanitarian authority presupposes structured reasoning and methodical
organisation, its mandate is still viewed through the lens of personal
impulse and independence. Improvising in the midst of chaos, testing the
limits of one’s endurance and ingenuity, following gut instinct even or
especially when it flouts the rules: these are the core stories that
acquaint the industry with its (potentially participant/donor) reading
audience. Where the humanitarian order is working towards wider
consensus, industry narrative relies on and cultivates what I would call
the sovereign irrational: an ideal of individual, intuitive integrity
seen as the fundamental component of what it means to be human. This
vision of the human undergirds, contradicts, but ultimately legitimates
the elaborate web of humanitarian power that is now part of the new
world order. It is nowhere more evident than in memoir – a genre that
already celebrates the revelation of pure individuality as an agent of
change within the status quo.

This chapter examines memoirs by ‘humanitarians’, that is,
workers in non-governmental or intergovernmental institutions devoted to
promoting the welfare of others. I exclude memoirs by aid recipients or
survivors, such as the significant body of life-writing by members of
the Lost Boys of Sudan, as these follow their own rules and logic. An
emerging genre (most titles date from the new millennium),
humanitarian-worker memoir nevertheless may already be divided into
subgenres. Surprisingly these do not necessarily fall into the ‘relief’
versus ‘development’ categories that have for so long divided the aid
industry itself. Rather, the genre tends to divide amongst aid worker
memoirs of individuals who document their experiences serving in one or
more humanitarian organisations, and memoirs of individuals (often
well-known in the industry, or Nobel Peace Prize-winners or nominees)
who have themselves founded a humanitarian organisation or served a
leading role within it. The first category includes Peace Corps memoirs,
memoirs of career professionals, and ‘gap year’ volunteer memoirs. These
books are often coming-of-age, ‘rite of passage’ narratives that move
the subject from naivety to thoughtfulness or cynicism; even while some
end with disillusionment and criticism of the aid industry, they usually
continue to affirm the writer’s original values and vision in some
rediscovered form.12
The founder narratives – whether autobiography or biography – tend to be
more analytical, focused on problem-solving and building support in
order to counter entrenched opposition or inertia. In both subgenres the
role of the ‘fool’ in a larger sea of institutional limitations proves
both revelatory and empowering, asserting the value of sui
generis intelligence to produce humanitarian knowledge and even
participate in global governance.

In this chapter I concentrate on
founder memoirs in the field of humanitarian international development.
I look at founder memoirs because there is more at stake in their need
to legitimise the organisation whose founding they describe; as a result
their perspectives speak more directly to humanitarian ideology. The
naive is also perhaps more surprising and provocative in this subgenre,
where in aid worker memoirs the reader expects the stories to be about a
novice confronting the field and learning from the outside. My aim is
not to give a comprehensive genre analysis; instead I look at two case
studies that represent distinct forms of the humanitarian naive at work.
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s 2006 award-winning but
controversial Three Cups of Tea is one of the bestselling
humanitarian founder memoirs of all time, spending 220 weeks on the
New York Times bestseller list.13 Muhammad Yunus’s 1999 Banker to the
Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty gives a
genesis story of one of the most influential recent reconfigurations of
aid provision, microfinance. As development memoirs, both illuminate the
impact international development has had on the humanitarian field and
reveal a core tension between humanitarian narrative and humanitarian
institutionalisation, where what might be called the field’s aesthetic
runs up against its growing forms of power.

Naive ontologies: the misfit abroad

Humanitarian founder narratives
build on the precedent of classic aid worker memoir: the protagonists
arrive knowing very little about their host countries or aid work – yet
their naivety is fruitful. Even as they learn the ropes they learn that
there are no ropes, that all good paths must be self-generated.14 But while aid worker
memoir tends to view the humanitarian international as part of the
larger global order, for founder narratives humanitarianism is still a
third sector capable of acting from outside. Thus unlike aid memoir,
where worker contributions may follow an individual logic but only as
exceptional drops in a larger institutional bucket, founder memoirs show
their heroes generating lasting outcomes based on following their own
instincts and personal calling.

One of the best places to begin a discussion of
humanitarian founder memoir is with Mortenson and Relin’s Three Cups
of Tea. It is the story of the unorthodox founder of the Central
Asia Institute (CAI), mountaineer-turned-humanitarian Greg Mortenson,
and his efforts to build schools across underserved and often remote
areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The book begins with Mortenson
(referred to in the third person throughout) lost in Pakistan’s
Baltistani mountains near K2 and accidentally discovering the town of
Korphe, where after being nursed to health he discovers that the town
children have no school and determines to build one for them. It is a
conversion narrative of sorts, ultimately transforming Mortenson, an
emergency room nurse, into the founder of a global education non-profit.
His shift from medical to education industries mirrors the rising
transition in post-war humanitarianism from relief to development
(notably before he became a medical worker Mortenson
was in the military – the other forebear of emergency humanitarianism),
while at the same time rejecting development’s rationalised and
deliberative ethos. One school leads to another as Mortenson becomes
more embedded in local relationships and develops a closer understanding
of the community and its needs. His accidental entry into school
building in Pakistan and Afghanistan becomes a lifelong mission. In
interview, Mortenson has said of CAI’s growth: ‘There was no initial
plan’, and throughout the memoir, Mortenson’s story demonstrates the
inferiority of planning as a form of humanitarian knowledge and
agency.15 He works
intuitively, for instance hiring CAI’s staff – a cast of unusual and
even ‘unsavory’ characters – based on ‘gut feelings’ rather than resumé,
producing ‘what has to be one of the most underqualified and
overachieving staffs of any charitable organization on earth’.16 Mortenson’s success,
the book maintains, is a result of a spontaneous, grassroots approach
that has allowed him to maintain his initial novice-like energy and
ingenuity. Unlike in a bildungsroman, his initial naivety does
not become worldliness; rather even as CAI expands Mortenson remains
‘foolish’ to the ways of the international development complex, setting
his own course in the mountains of central Asia.

Three Cups portrays its hero as a return to the
early humanitarian ideal – beginning with Dunant – of the lone pioneer
independently improvising solutions in a broken system without any
formal training. The locals, we are told, call Mortenson ‘Dr Greg’, even
though he has no MD or PhD. Mortenson’s self-taught autonomy is
represented in Relin’s introduction when we see him heroically guiding a
local pilot to land in the mountainous territory. Brigadier General
Bhangoo is ‘one of Pakistan’s most experienced high-altitude helicopter
pilots’, yet he almost imperils everyone on the plane when he gets lost
flying over terrain Mortenson has come to know – literally – on the
ground. ‘How is it you know the terrain better than me?’ the pilot asks,
later dubbing him ‘the most remarkable person I’ve ever met’ (1–3).
Mortenson’s self-taught expertise is celebrated later in the book by
Representative Mary Bono after she has become acquainted with his
knowledge of Muslim culture in Pakistan: ‘“I have to tell you I learned
more from you in the last hour than I have in all the briefings I’ve
been to on capitol Hill since 9/11. We’ve got to get you up there”’
(280–1). Humanitarian knowledge comes from lived experience and ‘winging
it’, not training or expertise, the book suggests (4). Mortenson’s
credibility as local guide and development pioneer also requires that we
see him as a student of the culture, though one who pointedly learns
outside of a classroom. His alternative ‘schooling’ is epitomised in the
scene where, after driving all of his workers crazy as taskmaster, he is
deprived of his tools and lectured by Korphe’s village chief Haji Ali on
the need to take time for ‘three cups of tea’ – a counter-vision of
development work that Mortenson commits himself to as apprentice. The
book quotes Mortenson as saying that this moment taught him the most
important lesson of his life, that ‘I had more to learn from the people
I work with than I could ever hope to teach them’ (150). A second time
Ali lectures Mortenson, following an apocryphal scene where he is kidnapped by the Taliban, and a second time
Mortenson says: ‘So once again, an illiterate old Balti taught a
Westerner how to best go about developing his “backward” area’
(177).

Dwelling on the role-reversal of foreign ‘expert’ and
local representative is a standard trope in aid memoir. It allows the
aid worker to adopt a pose of humility while claiming exception to
Western arrogance and appearing to make a naive intervention in
commonsense development attitudes (apparently unaware that this
‘intervention’ is already a commonplace in international development).
The quotes above serve a further function of magnifying Mortenson’s role
as novitiate of the local culture and its organic humanitarian
knowledge, whose mastery he demonstrates by educating his readers about
it. The Balti culture is represented in the book as itself a bearer of
naive knowledge, outside the paradigms of modernity. Indeed, Mortenson
is often quoted emphasising the danger of imposing ‘modern’ values and
mechanisms on a people who ‘still held the key to a kind of
uncomplicated happiness that was disappearing in the developing world as
fast as old-growth forests’ (120). Such statements help the book frame
its mission to a liberal audience eager to sympathise with a
non-threatening Islamic ‘other’. By aiding a people who are seen to
maintain a pre-modern worldview and (unlike al Qaeda) are not
technologically sophisticated, donating to CAI can be embraced as a
peaceful, non-Islamophobic contribution to the war on terror; it was in
fact required reading amongst US military officers during reconstruction
in Afghanistan.17 In
a post-2001 context, building schools (with culturally appropriate but
non-extremist education), the memoir insists, is the best way to counter
the power of the Wahhabi madrassas fuelling the rise of radical
Islamic extremism (241–5). By the end of the book Mortenson has become a
‘doctor’ of peace and human rights as well as humanitarian development,
a position he has earned through his non-traditional education in the
field.

If Mortenson is the ideal development visionary, able to
act as bridge between cultures and even (the book suggests)
temporalities, it is because like many aid workers he is presented as
being ‘different’ from other Westerners. He lives out of a storage
locker, doesn’t wear socks to a fancy event (where the guest of honour
is Sir Edmund Hillary), keeps a list of potential celebrity-donors in a
ziploc bag, and writes out his first batch of letters to Congressmen
appealing for funds on outdated technology. ‘“I had no idea what I was
doing”, Mortenson remembers. “I just kept a list of everyone who seemed
powerful or popular or important and typed them a letter. I was
thirty-six years old and I didn’t even know how to use a computer.
That’s how clueless I was”’ (50). Most telling, Mortenson doesn’t wear a
watch (24).18 He is,
we are told twice, living on ‘African time’, a behaviour trait left over
from growing up in Tanzania. ‘“Greg has never been on time in his life”,
his mother says. “Ever since he was a boy, Greg has always operated on
African time”’ (39). Mortenson’s mother-in-law goes one step further,
portraying him as a prehistoric but sublime ‘other’ living beyond the
boundary of civilisation:

‘I had to admit Tara was right, there was
something to this “Mr Wonderful” stuff’, Lila says. And like her
daughter, she had come to the conclusion that the large, gentle
man living two blocks away was cut from unusual cloth. ‘One
snowy night we were barbecuing, and I asked Greg to go out and
turn the salmon’, Lila says. ‘I looked out the patio door a
moment later and saw Greg, standing barefoot in the snow,
scooping up the fish with a shovel, and flipping it, like that
was the most normal thing in the world. And I guess, to him, it
was. That’s when I realized that he’s just not one of us. He’s
his own species’. (238)

Throughout, Three Cups develops the above image of
Mortenson as a savage mind challenger to Western decadence and
technology, naturally primed to find his abilities best realised in
‘developing world’ or indigenous contexts. This reinforces the reader’s
trust in him as a maverick figure who can see and act beyond managerial
or technical paradigms, a portrayal that is brought out in the memoir’s
language. During the story of Mortenson losing his way on the mountain
we see him waking up after having fallen asleep on the way down, lost,
exposed to the elements, separated from his climbing buddy. ‘He
untangled his hands from the blanket’s tight cocoon with nightmarish
inefficiency’ (17). The Young Reader’s version of Three Cups of
Tea elaborates on the ‘African time’ quote by explaining that after
he moved to the United States, ‘Greg never adjusted to the kind of
scheduled life that most Americans think of as normal’.19 In other words,
Mortenson’s inefficient, unscheduled habits are not those typically
valued by the business world, making him a fitting counterpoint to the
professionalised culture that has come to dominate ‘big’
humanitarianism.

The memoir develops – seemingly purposefully – the image
of its hero as an unlikely candidate to manage an international
organisation. This is most apparent when it comes to finances.
Mortenson’s often flailing attempts to get cash are part of his
anti-materialist appeal, and the memoir gains much traction from this
counterpoint as it moves agilely between his work in Baltistan and his
fundraising efforts back in the States. Sandwiched in between
descriptions of an uplift water scheme to help Kashmiri refugees in
northern Pakistan and a visit to pay respects to the exposed corpse of
Mother Teresa in Calcutta, we find Mortenson’s trip to Atlanta to meet
with a potential donor; the elderly widow picks him up in a car filled
with tin cans, arranges a massage for him in her living room, and in the
middle of the night wanders into his bedroom half-naked, in the end
giving nothing to the organisation. Stories like these of Mortenson’s
gullibility at home are effective foils to his openness and curiosity in
the field, his clumsy financiering separating him from the profit-driven
worldliness to which the non-profit industry pleads exception. As a kind
of ‘fool’ Mortenson offers readers (who are also potential donors) a
resolution to the ethical tension inherent in the industry between
altruism and commercialism, giving and selling. After the memoir’s
publication the press celebrated the (re)emergence of a non-corporate
humanitarianism: ‘[Mortenson’s] organisation has no fancy offices or
fleet of Land Cruisers like most aid agencies or non-governmental
organisations.’20Three Cups seemed to promise that a personality-driven, homemade
humanitarianism would preserve the industry’s
integrity by reducing its business to a single individual stripped of
all business-like qualities.

Indeed, Three Cups appears to celebrate its hero’s
self-described ‘cluelessness’ and even seeming incompetence. The book
includes, for instance, the story of how Mortenson, as executive
director of CAI, frustrates members of the organisation’s board of
directors because he doesn’t delegate or set boundaries. Tom Vaughan,
the former director of the board, explains Mortensons’s freewheeling
approach: ‘The board had a discussion about trying to make Greg account
for how he spent his time, but we realized that would never work. Greg
just does whatever he wants’ (229). Vaughan’s quote may seem severe, but
in the context of the memoir his admission merely affirms the
humanitarian basis of its hero’s success story and his sovereignty as a
‘separate species’; Mortenson’s unaccountable methods serve to
distinguish him from something as corporate-sounding as a board. Rather
than being a form of powerlessness, his financial naivety appears to
demonstrate his fitness for the field and his exceptionality as a
humanitarian worker.

The irony that history would reveal, of course, is that
going rogue when it comes to financial management does not necessarily
spell humanitarian redemption. Less than five years after the book’s
publication scandal broke, a scandal that halted its bestseller streak
and was followed months later by Relin’s suicide. In April of 2011
Sixty Minutes revealed that some of the stories were
fictionalised (the introductory narrative about getting lost and finding
Korphe and, most luridly, of being kidnapped and released by the
Taliban) and that CAI funds were being spent disproportionately on
private jet PR rather than education. Then Jon Krakauer, a former donor
to CAI, published a lengthy exposé of Mortenson’s mismanagement of CAI
funds, in particular funds used to promote Three Cups of Tea, and
of the number of schools he claimed to have built.21 Interpreting these revelations, Peter
Hessler questioned the ‘mom and pop’ quality of Mortenson’s
school-building efforts, suggesting that his organisation had become an
expansionist machine that no longer thought and acted at the local,
human level. Mortenson, he wrote, ‘believes in scale, speed, and the
constant need for more money and more construction’.22 Hessler’s image of CAI as top-down and
quantitatively obsessed contrasts with its image painted early on in the
media and in the book, a contradiction that illuminates some of the
potential consequences latent in aid memoir’s ‘amateur founder’ ideal.
Penguin’s promotional quotes and high-school-age study guide proclaim
that CAI’s story is about the power of a single individual, giving voice
to a desire latent in the humanitarian unconscious that the humanitarian
agent should subsume the humanitarian organisation; what the fallout of
the scandal suggests is what can happen when this actually takes
place.23 ‘The fact is
the CAI is Greg’, Tom Vaughan is quoted as saying in the memoir (230).
For the reading public this statement articulates a deep assumption
about the aid industry that, unlike other institutions, it should still
be ‘human’ and preserve human-scale governance within the larger global
order. The naive exceptionalism that helped to build Mortenson’s star
power seemed to guarantee this humanity; at the same
time the radical freedom it sanctioned may have laid the ground for
corruption and abuse.

The question of accountability was, as we have seen, one
of the motivators behind the rationalisation of the humanitarian
industry. At the same time this rationalisation has also frustrated aid
accountability. In the face of aid world corruption scandals and charges
of one-size-fits-all obliviousness, Three Cups returns us to the
‘small is beautiful’ equation of the humanitarian project with human
personality and biography, where individual character transcends and
supersedes rational planning. Perhaps it is for this reason that every
single summary or description of Mortenson’s work dutifully begins with
the story of his failing to summit K2 before getting lost and finding
Korphe, as though building schools was really the mountain he had wanted
to climb all along, only he didn’t know it. The memoir’s hero has
stumbled into international development, into the war on terror,
into his position of power. If a reader had any questions about whether
– as is so often said of the aid industry – the road to hell is paved
with good intentions, a backstory grounded in the naive absence of
intention might go a long way towards assuaging them.

Naive epistemologies: in search of the simple

As portrayed in Three Cups of
Tea, Greg Mortenson was the ultimate anti-professional humanitarian
hero, the founder of an international education NGO who had no expertise
in education, international development or public management. But many
founder narratives are written by or about professionals, even experts,
in their given fields.24 These narratives use the naive differently – less to
represent an outside culture and the aid worker’s belonging in it than
to reveal an outside analytic that the aid worker has helped generate or
discover. Though highly trained, ‘professional’ founders often describe
their foray into humanitarian work as a blank slate experience and their
success as the result of their outsider perspective and embrace of an
ingénue point of view. So, for instance, even an expert in economics
finds himself on fresh ground when he attempts to alleviate poverty via
the world of banking.

The search for solutions to development problems since the
height of the post-war era has tended to focus on ‘modernising’ poor
countries, usually using Western systems and institutions as models.
This has meant promoting technological makeovers, large-scale
infrastructure projects and economic liberalisation. At the same time
some of those with advanced training who are from developing countries
have taken a different approach, generating alternative ideas for how to
structurally alter conditions of impoverishment, powerlessness and
inequality. Perhaps the most famous of these is Muhammad Yunus, the
founder of the Grameen Bank and one of the pioneers of microcredit
banking. Yunus and the bank he founded earned the 2006 Nobel Peace prize
for helping to create a new form of financial services, oriented towards
rural women in Bangladesh trapped in cycles of debt to predatory
moneylenders because they cannot obtain bank loans. Since 1983 when the
Grameen Bank was officially authorised by the
Bangladeshi government (the same year that Acción International founded
the first international network of microlending organisations in Latin
America), microcredit has been widely embraced as the silver bullet of
development economics. Despite recent criticisms, microfinance (which
includes microsavings and microinsurance as well as microcredit) remains
a significant player on the global scene.25 Including non-profit and for-profit
banks, NGOs, and other financial structures, it is estimated to be a
$60–100 billion industry serving 200 million clients and is a key
contributor to wider approaches that see the extension of financial
services to the rural poor as a necessary component of international
development.26

Muhammad Yunus began to experiment with microlending in
the mid-1970s, which is when his memoir, Banker to the Poor,
begins. Banker to the Poor is a testament to how well narrative
can function as an alternative textbook, teaching complex concepts
through a step-by-step discovery process. Yunus allows plenty of time to
explain the economics of the Bangladeshi borrowing system to his readers
– he does not disavow his expertise. But he also takes the reader with
him into a state of ignorance. The technique works to transmit Yunus’s
ideas to a potentially non-expert audience, while also building up his
role (and hence that of his organisation) as interloper in the world of
rural poverty alleviation. For Yunus this interloping is a discursive
experience, one that returns again and again to an engagement with a
single word. The memoir pointedly positions the problem of cyclical,
intractable poverty against the question of the ‘simple’. The simple
grows throughout the opening pages, taking on a larger-than-life
quality, as Yunus gets deeper into a world he has developed theories
about but never truly known.

If there were a compendium of ‘keywords’ in humanitarian
development memoir, the ‘simple’ would be a necessary inclusion. As with
Raymond Williams’s keywords, the term is part of popular vocabulary but
laden with cultural and social meanings that at once indicate and
interpret experience.27 As we shall see, it is also a term whose successful
appropriation endows the writer or speaker with a specific power: the
power to authorise a particular type of action, especially in the
context of a challenge to formal evaluative guidelines. Claiming ‘the
simple’ reinforces the humanitarian desire to strip reality down to
elemental, unequivocal truths in order to imagine deeds that are clear
and unambivalent, and it reaffirms the belief that such work takes place
outside of complicating superstructures. The term is used in this way,
for instance, in environmentalist Wangari Maathai’s founder memoir
Unbowed, when she is coaching her team of rural Kenyan women how
to plant trees in the early stages of the Green Belt movement. She does
so against the advice of foresters who have told her ‘You need people
with diplomas to plant trees’. But, she realises, ‘professionals can
make simple things complicated’.28 In Banker to the Poor the quest for the simple
emerges as a kind of unorthodox divination system. It becomes a way of
exposing the false justification of business-as-usual and a way of
discovering and naming the founding principle of a new kind of business:
the seemingly impossible, paradoxical and
contradictory business of humanitarian banking, of being a banker
to the poor. As naive interrogator, Yunus exposes the illogic of the
system, an illogic whose complexity can seemingly only be addressed by a
systemic outside, by something that cuts through the maze of
exploitation and circularity of poverty in rural Bangladesh.

But first he must become that interrogator. The action
begins with Yunus, chair of the economics department at Chittagong
University, disenchanted with the world he has trained to work in. It is
1974, during the Bangladeshi famine, and the national response is
crippled; religious organisations find that even ‘the simple act of
collecting the dead’ exceeds their capacities. All that is left is mute
communication. ‘The starving people did not chant any slogans. They did
not demand anything from us well-fed city folk. They simply lay down
very quietly on our doorsteps and waited to die.’29 The eloquence of the simple – figured
in the images of dying and collecting the dead – is at once statement
and accusation, challenging Yunus to devise a way to meet it on its own
terms. But his field fails this test, lost in an abstract philosophy of
knowledge-production that ignores the physical reality that Yunus will
later incorporate into his own theories.

I used to feel a thrill at teaching my
students the elegant economic theories that could supposedly
cure societal problems of all types. But in 1974, I started to
dread my own lectures. What good were all my complex theories
when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and
porches across from my lecture hall? […] Nothing in the economic
theories I taught reflected the life around me […] I needed to
run away from these theories and from my textbooks and discover
the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence. (viii)

So Yunus
sets off to Jobra village, the town next to Chittagong where he teaches,
to ‘become a student all over again’, to learn how to grasp the
realities of everyday life outside of ‘traditional book learning’ (ix).
Instead of the macro the micro will be his analytical lens, as it will
eventually be the foundation of his humanitarian enterprise: naively
shifting from universal, systems-based thinking to the point of view of
the radical particular. In an echo of Mortenson’s tutelage under Haji
Ali, Yunus writes, ‘The poor taught me an entirely new economics’
(ix).

Yunus’s first teacher is Sufiya Begum, one of many in a
series of interviews he conducts with local women, ultra-low wage
earners, behind a bamboo wall or curtain (since he is male and the
custom of purdah requires it). In a widely cited story, he
recounts learning that Begum’s profit off of bamboo stools was only two
cents a day since she lacked the twenty-two cents worth of capital
needed to buy the raw bamboo materials herself instead of from the
usurious trader. In sequence Yunus flirts with conventional aid
responses that seem ‘so simple, so easy’: giving Begum the money
outright, loaning all the villagers their needed funds (twenty-seven
dollars) interest-free. He rejects the first and tries the second, only
to have morning-after regrets; these are simple
responses, but not simple solutions (48–51). So he goes to persuade the
bank, source of commercial lending rates to which middle and higher
income people in developing countries have access, to issue a loan to
the villagers. The lengthy debate that follows pivots on contradictory
uses of the word ‘simple’, each seeking to claim its soul; on the side
of the bank manager it signifies the law of banking necessity and on the
side of Yunus, humanitarian freedom.

The
manager begins with what he thinks is an unanswerable rhetorical
question: how do you run a bank with illiterate clients?

‘Simple,
the bank just issues a receipt for the amount of cash that the
bank receives’.

‘What if
the person wants to withdraw money?’

‘I don’t
know … there must be a simple way. The borrower comes back with
his or her deposit receipt, presents it to the cashier, and the
cashier gives back the money. Whatever accounting the bank does
is the bank’s business’. (53)

The branch
manager is not convinced and tells him, ‘Professor, banking is not as
simple as you think’, to which Yunus responds, ‘banking is not as
complicated as you make it out to be’. At this moment the word is seized
by the manager himself: ‘Look, the simple truth is that a borrower at
any other bank in any place in the world would have to fill out forms.’
Again he emphasises, ‘we simply cannot lend to the destitute’. Yunus
parries with the basic naive question: ‘Why not?’, asking the status quo
to reveal its own mandate (53). The manager’s answer unveils the core
problem of banking for the poor: collateral, security against the risk
of default. Yunus, as the voice of naive logic, states the obvious:
‘It’s a silly rule. It means only the rich can borrow’ (54).It is one
thing to know general principles about banking, another to sit in the
chair as if you yourself were a group of poor women applying for
a loan. Above Yunus confronts the rules of the bank experientially,
placing himself in the role of the disenfranchised trying to get a loan
and pushing irreverently until he hits the wall of a final cause. In the
end it turns out that the branch manager doesn’t even have the authority
to grant loans (though he does eventually direct Yunus to the
higher-ups); like a Monty Python sketch he is having fun with
Professor Yunus, who is made a fool of even as he has played the fool in
order to expose and challenge the unfairness of the system.

The power of the fool is not so much to reveal or elicit
particular information: that is the role of the sleuth or the
investigator. It is rather to reveal the abstract realities and forces
that create reality, its laws, principles and governing modes. ‘It had
become clear from my discussions with bankers in the past few days that
I was not up against the Janata Bank per se but against the banking
system in general […] Out of sheer frustration, I had questioned the
most basic banking premise of collateral. I did not know if I was right.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was walking blind and
learning as I went along’ (55, 57). Once the premise of collateral has
been challenged Yunus, still ‘walking blind’, tries different strategies
for replacing it, eventually hitting on the invention of group lending.
This solution is directly heretical to the
assumption that banking economics is an abstract system based on signs
and representations, for Yunus’s ‘simple’ intervention has been to
reformulate the rationalised, abstract banking system as an intuitive,
physical one. ‘My work became a struggle to show that the financial
untouchables are actually touchable, even huggable’ (57). Demonstrating
the ‘touchability’ of the banking untouchables is not only a caste
allusion, but the very essence of Yunus’s approach: to convert the
impersonal, bureaucratic institution into human relationships. He
literally tells his workers to ‘touch’ their clients in an effort to
understand their perspective and ‘mentality’ (81).30 Intimate contact is further epitomised
by the borrower ‘support groups’ whose ‘peer-pressure’ he stresses will
guarantee loan recovery in the absence of collateral (62). All of these
relationships make ‘human trust’, not ‘meaningless paper contracts’, the
basis of the loan-recovery procedure. ‘Grameen would succeed or fail
depending on the strength of our personal relationships. We may be
accused of being naive, but our experience with bad debt is less than 1
percent’ (70).31 In
Banker to the Poor, these relationships appear to be the simple
governing logic of microfinance.

The essence of microfinance may be relationships, but in
the end the institution still subscribes to the logic of individual
accountability and autonomy that governs traditional banking. The
implication that the ‘naive’ approach of microcredit constitutes a
humanitarian intervention in commercial logic and economic inequality
has been challenged on the grounds that it replicates neoliberal
ideologies of individual entrepreneurship over state safety nets and
sees market involvement as the solution to poverty.32 Ultimately, solidarity lending enables
the bank to shift to borrowers – now interpellated as self-governing,
responsible entrepreneurs – the burden of cost and risk.33 For this reason
Morgan Brigg argues that microcredit is not in fact a conceptual
revolution of approaches to poverty alleviation or rural development; it
differs only in that it is ‘micro’:

Notions of individual initiative,
determination and provision of capital to improve people’s
situation and increase economic growth are a micro-version of
the dominant economistic development approach, and resonate with
aspects of modernization theory which dominated in the 1950s and
1960s. Thus while it is possible to view microcredit as a
radical departure from conventional development practice, it
also exhibits significant continuities with the approach of
previous decades and does not introduce a rupture or significant
shift in the development dispositif.34

Rather than
the promised ‘outside’ on which the humanitarian imaginary depends,
then, microcredit may be viewed as a vast expansion of the ‘inside’,
extending contemporary capitalism to new markets by cultivating the
ethos of ‘individual initiative’ and self-determination amongst
previously disenfranchised borrowers.35

It is just this focus on the individual that has made
microfinance so attractive to international donors.36 I would also argue that the attraction
goes even deeper than political or economic ideologies, including a
cultural anti-systems fantasy that has been historically attached to the
humanitarian project. In other words, the ‘micro’ –
equitable with the individual and with the ‘simple’ – is itself an
object of humanitarian desire. As with Greg Mortenson, organisational
power is understood as humanitarian only if it is reframed through the
human. Positioned against the history of large-scale, top-down foreign
loans and development programmes, microfinance offers a hyper-local,
improvisatory theory of social change that, like Three Cups,
celebrates the natural intelligence of the person over the formal
intelligence of the institution. Only this time it is the figure of the
beneficiary, not the humanitarian founder, who theoretically serves as
the naive axis of change. This was made possible as the ideology of
self-help came to challenge that of aid in international development,
turning the micro-borrower into the figure par excellence of global
humanitarianism. In this context Yunus’s memoir serves the important
function of appropriating for the micro-lender and his institution the
borrower’s naive appeal, thus downplaying microcredit’s affinities with
the macro financial complex.

We have seen how Yunus claims the power of the ‘simple’
while occupying the subject-position of the poor person applying for a
loan. In this way the memoir imagines Yunus’s subjectivity as a
collective one: Yunus conveys the rational authority of a banker and
head of a lending institution while engaging and putting into play the
innocent subversiveness of the fool, grounded in what the book presents
as the simple ‘mentality’ of the aspiring micro-entrepreneur. Thus
Banker advertises the naive humanitarian dimension of microcredit
in opposition to the cynical sophistication of traditional banking and
development approaches. Key to this project is the particular
subjectivity of the microcredit founder as established through
humanitarian memoir. Banker to the Poor illustrates that one of
Yunus’s great innovations was the creation of a new sovereign figure:
the grassroots, unregulated yet corporate social entrepreneur.

Conclusion

If the central appeal of the naive
to humanitarian studies is its promise of an intellectual and practical
‘outside’ to state and corporate sectors, both CAI and Grameen Bank have
disappointed hopes that they would deliver. That this is the case in
both examples selected is not intended as an empirical indictment of
that promise; rather, the revelations of ‘inside’ complicity serve to
highlight how strong is the desire for the institutionalisation of a
humanitarian alternative in public culture, that even those cases most
hailed as harbingers of such an alternative still demonstrate the
difficulty of its attainment. I have presented these two founder memoirs
as examples of the prominence and use of the naive in humanitarian
life-writing. Three Cups of Tea and Banker to the Poor
depict two complementary figures who populate the genre: the naive
pioneer and the naive philosopher. Each fulfils its own reader fantasy.
In the first type, naive humanitarianism is defined as a combination of
professional innocence and gut instinct that helps the founder bridge
heterogeneous worlds in order to build new institutions. In the second
humanitarianism appears as naive questioning of
establishment first principles, with the founder adopting the role of
simpleton in order to effect a fundamental change in supposedly
self-evident practices and ways of thinking. But they also share
important appeals to the reader, including a suspicion of ‘expert’
knowledge and planning and a belief that humanitarian institutions
should be ‘human’ – whether through literal identification, as in the
case of Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute, or by following
small-scale thinking and approaches, as we see with Muhammad Yunus’s
story of his founding of microcredit and the Grameen Bank. Above all,
the ‘naive’ of the institution’s beneficiaries should be absorbed,
mirrored or complemented by the founder himself. Thus Three Cups’
Mortenson, whose personality appears in bold contrast to that of Western
executive and administrative culture, is at home in the ‘wild’ of
northern Pakistan.37
And Banker’s Yunus constructs a ground-breaking economic theory
and practice based on the experience and point of view of ‘illiterate’
rural women. These traits, though perhaps most prominent in the founder
genre, also influence the construction of aid worker memoirs,
highlighting the special contributions that memoir, a genre constructed
on the power of personality and confessional authenticity, has made to
humanitarian narrative during a time of industry professionalisation and
expansion.

Notes

1H. Dunant and
International Committee of the Red Cross, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva: International Committee of the
Red Cross, 1986); M. Thomsen, Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1969).

3M. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of
Humanitarianism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 105.

4Barnett, Empire of Humanity, p. 108.
Tales of the imperfect implementation of this project are legion,
often testifying to a blind faith in technology without
consideration of context, maintenance or potential disruption to
wider systems – often with devastating consequences. See, for
example, Ilana Feldman’s critique of CARE’s attempts to bring
electricity to Gaza, Michael Maren’s takedown of Peace Corps water
towers in Kenya, and, in broader strokes, Arturo Escobar’s analysis
of the long-term effects of the Green Revolution. See I. Feldman, ‘The Humanitarian Circuit: Relief Work,
Development Assistance, and CARE in Gaza, 1955–67’, in E. Bornstein and P. Redfield (eds), Forces of
Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics
(Santa Fe: School
for Advanced Research Press, 2011), pp. 203–26; M. Maren,
The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of
Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: Free
Press, 1997); A. Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

5Originally introduced by CARE, kits have now
become a staple of Médicins Sans Frontières’ global mobilisation of
medical relief. See P. Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors
Without Borders (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California
Press, 2013), pp. 79–80.

9It is now possible to get a bachelor’s or
master’s degree in Europe and North America in such areas as Global
Humanitarian Engineering, Logistics Management-Humanitarian and
Disaster Relief, Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and
International Humanitarian Action.

11D. Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the
Present, trans. R. Gomme (Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 2012).

12L. Smirl, ‘The State We Aren’t In: Liminal
Subjectivity in Aid-Worker Autobiographies’, in B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Statebuilding and State-Formation: The
Political Sociology of Intervention (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 230–45. In
Smirl’s samples all subjects descend into a despair and
disillusionment that prompt the final return home; this trait
distinguishes them from the memoirs of Peace Corps volunteers, who
have signed up for cultural exchange as well as humanitarian work
and hence tend to be less ambitious about effecting change in their
host countries.

14In the 2013 memoir Chasing Chaos, for
instance, Jessica Alexander arrives in Sudan long past her initial
ignorance of international affairs (now she knows how to spell
Tegucigalpa), but she has no sense of direction, clinging to her
unnamed NGO’s formulated wisdom and planning strategies. As she
continues to work, however, she realises that ‘naivete and humility
actually worked to my advantage’, making her more receptive to the
input and advice of the community. See J. Alexander, Chasing Chaos:
My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (New York: Broadway
Books, 2013), p. 163.

16G. Mortenson and D. O. Relin, Three
Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a
Time (New York: Penguin, 2006),
pp. 4, 3. Subsequent references will
be provided parenthetically in the text.

17N. Ali, ‘Books vs Bombs? Humanitarian Development and the
Narrative of the War on Terror in Northern Pakistan’, Third World Quarterly, 31:4 (2010), pp. 541–59. As Ali also points
out, the book’s essentialisation of Northern Pakistani culture and
its reliance on standard ‘tropes of backwardness’ also contributed
to its use by the US government during reconstruction efforts during
the war on terror.

18When Greg gets to Korphe he is leading a
procession of fifty curious children. ‘The children fingered his
shalwar, searched his wrists for the watch he didn’t wear,
and took turns holding his hands’ (24). How the children, who we are
told earlier had never before seen a foreigner, knew that a
foreigner would most likely wear a watch is never explained.

21J. Krakauer, Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson,
Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way (New York: Anchor Books, 2011). Krakauer has since followed up,
reporting that corruption remains endemic in CAI and that some of
the ‘Dirty Dozen’ of ragtag misfits Mortenson hired have diverted
huge sums from the organisation. See ‘Is it Time to Forgive Greg
Mortenson?’ Daily Beast (8 April 2013), www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/08/is-it-time-to-forgive-greg-mortenson.html.
Accessed 20 May 2017.

24Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy
Kidder’s 2003 biography of Paul Farmer, a doctor and infectious
diseases specialist who co-founded the NGO Partners in Health, is a
well-known example; and, although he does not mention this
background in his 1862 memoir A Memory of Solferino, Henri
Dunant was an experienced social activist, able to apply his
knowledge and skills to medical crises in work leading to the
founding of the ICRC.

25Criticisms include its high interest rates,
which increase the risk of loan default and over-indebtedness;
misrepresenting loan recovery rates; producing loan recycling and
consumption smoothing instead of economic development; failing to
demonstrate any significant reduction in poverty or women’s
empowerment; and creating psychological trauma amongst those
populations that use the industry’s famous group lending
approach.

29M.Yunus with A. Jolis, Banker
to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World
Poverty (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), p. vii. Subsequent
references will be provided parenthetically in the text.

30The literal personal touch is the simple
foundation of the trust between borrower and bank, humanising the
inhuman world of debt and finance. Grameen’s vision here may be
hailed as the banking corollary to Marx’s famous dictum about
commercial transactions: that however obscured by commodities, in
the end the relationship is a social one, between people rather than
between things.

31In the decades following, Grameen would
advertise a still impressive 98 per cent loan recovery rate.
However, as L. Karim points out, this figure includes forced
recoveries as well as voluntary ones, which may be misleading. See
Microfinance and its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. xxii.

33Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?
p. 160; D. M.
Roodman, Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into
Microfinance (Washington,
DC: Center for Global
Development, 2012), p. 106. Bateman comments on the burden shift in
terms of high interest rates; the application of this logic to
solidarity lending is my own. The goal also includes independence
from the local predatory moneylenders and from their husbands and
male kin. The extent to which either of these forms of independence
actually occurs has been contested, with loan money sometimes
appropriated by husbands or other male kin or funnelled back into
local moneylender circuits. See A. M. Goetz
and R. S. Gupta, ‘Who
Takes the Credit? Gender, Power, and Control Over Loan Use in Rural
Credit Programs in Bangladesh’, World Development,24:1 (1996), pp. 49–50; Roodman, Due Diligence, pp. 25–7.
In evaluating the status of the loan as an intra-household commodity
and object of resource leverage and manipulation, Goetz and Gupta
quote one field worker as saying that credit ‘is just another form
of dowry’, though they point out that amongst the organisations they
surveyed in Bangladesh, Grameen Bank had the highest rate of female
control over loans given (54, 60). Karim also notes the
contradiction between the ideology of rational sovereignty and
kinship constraints acting on these female borrowers
(Microfinance and its Discontents, p. xvi).

35Its great success is incorporating the
economically marginalised into an institutional system that – while
potentially empowering them as free agents – nevertheless also
maintains their subordination as citizens and to private
industry.

36M. Bateman and H.-J. Chang, ‘Microfinance and the Illusion of Development: From Hubris to
Nemesis in Thirty Years’, World
Economic Review1
(2012), pp. 28–9.

37For a discussion of the portrayal of rural
Pakistan as ‘wild’ in the memoir see Ali, ‘Books vs. Bombs?’

Smirl, L.,
‘The State We Aren’t In: Liminal
Subjectivity in Aid-Worker Autobiographies’, in B.Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Statebuilding and State-Formation: The Political Sociology of
Intervention (Oxon and New York:
Routledge, 2012), pp. 230–45.